Just keep on trying till you run out of cake

HD DVD vs Blu Ray format war is over. I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else mention this story, and I almost managed to miss it entirely. Toshiba are abandoning their HD DVD format, leaving Blu Ray as the winner of the format war. Hurrah and about bloody time, if you ask me. Now that I know that I'm not going to be left with an overpriced paperweight, I might actually consider buying one of the things. Of course, after considering it, I'll decide that they're still way more expensive than they're worth, and entirely useless since I don't have an HD TV, but that's besides the point.

Not only do you need a HD TV but it needs to be at least 42" for you to be able to tell the difference between an upscaled DVD image and a 720p image at sofa-from-TV distance with 20-20 vision. HD video is a niche product for people with big screen home cinema set ups, it's the new laserdisc, not the new DVD. Sky HD channels only look better on a smaller HD TV because Sky transmits SD channels at a criminally low bitrate that makes them look dreadful.

Having experienced 36 HD shiny, my take on the whole thing is pretty much "TV you have to put your glasses on for". Which isn't inherently a bad thing - it can be visually stunning, and it seems that the BBC HD channel is worth it entirely for non-wanky bitrates[1] - but as such I'm going to hold off until such a time as I need to wear glasses for SD telly[2].

(There's a rant about tellies that can't accept VGA/DVI input at multiples of 50Hz[3] here that I'll mostly leave as an excercise for the reader.)

HD-DVD was of course doomed from the outset by being technically superior and not having "Blu" in the name...

[1] Later With Jools Holland isn't an almost constant mess of MPEG aretfacts, for example.

[2] Or the magic blue smoke escapes from the telly, whichever happens first.

[3] That which our TV is interlaced for, for any leftpondians reading.

We are supposed to be getting Holographic DVD's sometime in the next year or so. These disks have nearly triple the capacity of a Blue-Ray Disk and read faster. It is possible that Toshiba abandoned HD-DVD in favor of putting their eggs into the Holographic DVD basket instead.

The format war is basically crap since you can almost get movies off the internet faster than you can get in a car and drive to rent or buy a movie now. Many companies, Sony Included, are actually pushing the newer generation of media center PC's and actually having home media servers with massive hard drives.

My suggestion is instead of buying a Blue-Ray player and all the HD accutriments that go with it, just buy a nice sound system and an HDTV and use your standard DVD player until you eventually decide to plug your computer into your TV.